With Calmer Winds, Texas Firefighters Make Progress Against Vast Blaze

Already enduring a record-setting statewide drought, Texas is now battling a series of wildfires that have destroyed more than 1,000 homes, mostly near Austin. Smoke from the biggest blaze loomed over the small town of Bastrop on Tuesday.Credit
Eric Gay/Associated Press

BASTROP, Tex. — Bob and Margaret Austin stared at the hills in the distance, where towering plumes of white and black smoke stretched across the blue horizon Tuesday. They had survived the flames of a wildfire, but they had no idea if their house had been as lucky.

About 11 a.m. Monday, a state trooper told the couple that they had 15 minutes to evacuate. They filled their two vehicles with her grandmother’s jewelry, his firearms and their mortgage papers and photo albums, along with a puppy and a kitten. They realized later that they had left behind the urn with Mr. Austin’s mother’s ashes.

“Fifteen minutes is not a lot of time,” said Mr. Austin, 62. “You think of a thousand things after you’ve left.”

The couple had fled the most destructive wildfire in the history of Texas, a vast blaze that has destroyed 550 homes in Bastrop County in Central Texas and killed two people since it began Sunday, one of a series of wildfires that have broken out around the state in recent days.

By Tuesday afternoon, the Bastrop fire continued to burn as dozens of evacuated residents from outlying subdivisions sought aid at Bastrop Middle School, which officials had turned into a shelter.

Photo

Source: U.S. Forest ServiceCredit
The New York Times

“You look at people’s faces around here, and it looks like they’ve been in a war,” Mr. Austin said, leaning against a school wall as American Red Cross workers and evacuees walked in and out of the cafeteria. “I talked to an elderly couple in their 80s last night, and they got out with just their clothes and their dog.”

Since wildfire season began in November 2010, nearly 21,000 fires have destroyed more than 1,500 homes throughout Texas, according to state officials. More than half of those destroyed residences — roughly 770 — have been lost since dozens of new fires erupted over the Labor Day weekend, fueled by high winds and the dry conditions created by the state’s worst one-year drought on record. Throughout Central Texas and other parts of the state, including Montgomery County near Houston, about 2,000 firefighters were battling wildfires that have burned more than 118,400 acres in recent days.

Gov. Rick Perry deployed the state’s elite search team to look for more possible victims in Bastrop County, following the discovery on Tuesday of two bodies. Officials said they had not yet positively identified the bodies and released few details about the circumstances surrounding the discovery, but they did say the victims appeared to be civilians and not emergency responders.

The search team, known as Texas Task Force 1, was in Bastrop on Wednesday morning to assist local officials in looking for additional victims. The team is made up of 100 members and nearly one dozen canines, and is part of the task force that the state sent to New York City after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in 2001 and to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

The worst fire by far has been the one in Bastrop County, roughly 30 miles east of Austin. It has destroyed more homes than any other single wildfire in state history, gutting 550 residences and forcing about 5,000 people to evacuate as it has burned through 34,000 acres, according to the Texas Forest Service. Previously, the most destructive wildfire was one that broke out in April in Palo Pinto County, west of Fort Worth, that destroyed nearly 170 homes.

The flames in Bastrop have brought life to a virtual standstill. Public schools have shut their doors for the week. Residents of 20 subdivision neighborhoods were forced to evacuate. Many of those outside the city were under orders to boil their water. Hundreds of people have been sleeping overnight at emergency shelters, while other evacuees have rooms in local hotels or are staying with friends or relatives. There have been power outages and road closures as the fire reached within a few miles of the heart of Bastrop, a small city of 7,200 along the Colorado River.

Video

TimesCast | Wildfires Rage Across Texas

Wildfires cut a path of destruction across Texas. Hardest hit was the town of Bastrop in Central Texas.

Bastrop County’s top elected official, County Judge Ronnie McDonald, described the 24-mile-long fire as catastrophic. Mr. McDonald expected the number of destroyed houses to increase. “Bastrop is no longer the same,” he said Tuesday evening at the emergency command post at the Bastrop convention center. “You used to come through Bastrop and you saw the pine trees. Now all you see is tar.”

As of Wednesday morning the fire, which began Sunday afternoon, was still only 30 percent contained, though firefighters had made significant progress overnight, aided in part by the calmer winds, the forest service said.

Residents have been told that it is too dangerous to check on their homes, and officials said they were working on a re-entry plan as well as posting a partial list of houses that have been confirmed as destroyed. “I think it will give some type of relief to individuals who just don’t know,” Mr. McDonald said of the list.

The Austin family stayed overnight at a hotel, but they came to the middle school on Tuesday seeking information. Nobody was able to confirm for them if the house where they had lived since April in the Tahitian Village subdivision had survived.

Mr. Austin, a former volunteer firefighter in Oklahoma, stared at the plumes of smoke. He said the white plume was from the steam from the water being poured on the flames; the dark one worried him more.

“The black plume’s what you don’t want to see,” he said. It meant structures were burning.

A version of this article appears in print on September 7, 2011, on page A16 of the New York edition with the headline: With Calmer Winds, Texas Firefighters Make Progress Against Vast Blaze. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe